Ministry of Innovation —

Raspberry Pis hide narrative in the city to complete offline book

Two tales of two cities.

"There is another city, and it might be a millennium old, or merely an hour. It coexists with your own, bridging the soft places, blurring rigidity and permanence... This cannot hold... As each manifests, one city must fall. One city will burn and these pages you write will fall like ash."

An academic and an artist have hidden Raspberry Pis across Bristol (UK) that transmit sections of narrative to readers hoping to fill in the blanks of an offline book.

The project, These Pages Fall Like Ash, is headed up by academic and Pervasive Media Studio resident Tom Abba and artist Duncan Speakman. The story is a tale of two cities, one being the reader's physical surroundings in Bristol, the other a second city that cannot be seen—a kind of parallel universe that coexists with the physical.

Participants are all supplied with a beautifully crafted wood-bound notebook, in which they will find two tales—one tracing the fictional city, the other describing the city in which the reader resides.

The narrative follows two people who once knew each other, but now appear to have forgotten the other exists. One lives in the parallel city, the other may live in your city, or be caught somewhere between the two. It's a story that uses the physical, the digital, and a reader's comprehension of the two to join the dots between those worlds and finish the story. Speakman refers to it as "haunting a place before you've seen it."

The writer has left blank spaces in his tale for the reader to either fill in or source in hidden pockets across the city, with smartphones or tablets picking up a network from the 15 hidden Raspberry Pis when they come into range. As the line between the physical book and the digital material blur, the reader becomes the mediator of that line, controlling it, adding to it, and eventually leading it to its conclusion.

"E-books are incredibly convenient and portable, but we lose that sense of a relationship with a physical object," Abba told Wired.co.uk. "We wanted it to feel like it was something you owned, that you took away with you—your journal, diary, companion throughout this two-and-a-half-week story experience, and that's critical. There's something about not just making this work on digital devices, but making the interplay between the physical and the digital a key part of it so that we felt we were guiding an audience into a space."

Abba and Speakman are one of eight groups that were awarded a React Hub R&D grant to research and trial different ways of combining digital and physical storytelling. As such, Abba sees this very much as an experiment—we're so early on in our understanding of how these two worlds can converge in a satisfying way to improve our experience of reading. One project uses the GPS in smartphones to enrich tales of train travel, while Jekyll 2.0 plans to use biodata.

These Pages Fall Like Ash launched in Bristol on April 20 and will run to May 8, with the story told across three acts. It is, says Abba, a throwback to serialized fiction of Dickens' day. This time, though, it's the Raspberry Pis that are releasing each installment, not periodicals.

"Content gets released every few days basis in geographically located chapters," says Abba. "We're asking people to use two platforms, a physical notebook and digital device, so it will be interesting to see how will they read between the two. Can we make the two interact? The experience as it rolls out is very much site-specific and located around the city. Readers use a map inside the notebook that describes where they should be standing. We're not just asking them to go to a castle or a park—there are things about the place that are pertinent. These two cities are overlapping and interacting."

The project has already been running for a few days, and so far people have taken to the interactive portion with ease, uploading data to complete the story as well as using pencil and paper to fill in the gaps. "We've had poetry written in response, photos taken [apps like Hisptamatic are used to upload these], and the books are in use."

This is important, because by act three, readers are expected to take part. "The first act gives them training wheels—the storytelling, how we're going to get content, and how we think they might read it," says Abba. "Then the more our readers engage, our question is will they contribute into act three and will that work? The resonance of how it works in storytelling is entirely down to the audience and what they give us. We think we've written the experiential parts in a way that will invite contribution, but it's a close-your-eyes-and-see moment. It opens out what we'll do next. Everyone's tried to figure out what the grammars of this kind of storytelling might be—everything really is a controlled experiment."

Abba is very much of the mind that the adventure Dungeons and Dragons-style novel is not the path to take. They want the readers to seamlessly start interacting, manipulating, and finally leading the story—while retaining "that shared space between the author and the reader where the reader imagines" rather than simply being presented with jarring yes and no options.

Abba is interested in exploring people's' relationship with the city in which they live. Having moved to Bristol 21 years ago, part of it for him is about recapturing that moment when everything is new, that sense of discovery and excitement.

"It gets people to look at their city in a different way—how it works and how they interact with it. It gets them to see things they've never seen before, and imagine things they've never seen before. We walk around with our map and smartphone and can find out where we are within five meters. That sort of closes down [our relationship with the city], but can also open it up. It depends on the type of content we engage with."

This is what These Pages Fall Like Ash is trying to achieve—to find the right balance to engage with that physical and digital world in a way that enriches the experience of reading, not hampering it in any way and not simply mimicking how we traditionally read, as e-books do.

"If you look at stage versions of films, any good adaptation looks at the heart of the text and asks 'what's the text trying to do and how's it trying to communicate?' And one of the really interesting things about working in digital is that we are figuring that out, in a very, very broad sense."

There are plans to translate the finished version online, but whatever participants penned in their notebooks remains their own private piece of the tale. If all goes well, we can hope to see Abba and Speakman take over London, New York, and beyond.

You can still catch up with the story if you sign up by April 29, with the third act coming to a close on May 8.

23 Reader Comments

I had a hard time grasping what this is actually about, really. I think brutally forcing a "book" into this idea which is totally different than a book just ruins it. This should be a game, not a book. OK, it *is* a game, but why weight it down with a book? If this works then despite that damned book, not because of it. It's like making a swimming pool fly.

Well, I will read this article again, maybe I missed something. Or is this meant to be nothing but art?

I just hope they "hid" the Pis with full knowledge and consent of the property owners and preferably where no unsuspecting passer-by will see them and get nervous, (un)like what happened with that Cartoon Network promotion.

I had a hard time grasping what this is actually about, really. I think brutally forcing a "book" into this idea which is totally different than a book just ruins it. This should be a game, not a book. OK, it *is* a game, but why weight it down with a book? If this works then despite that damned book, not because of it. It's like making a swimming pool fly.

Well, I will read this article again, maybe I missed something. Or is this meant to be nothing but art?

Moderation: flagged for trolling.

Nothing but art?

Jesus; sometimes it's easy to forget just how far along the autistic spectrum Ars readers are...

I had a hard time grasping what this is actually about, really. I think brutally forcing a "book" into this idea which is totally different than a book just ruins it. This should be a game, not a book. OK, it *is* a game, but why weight it down with a book? If this works then despite that damned book, not because of it. It's like making a swimming pool fly.

Well, I will read this article again, maybe I missed something. Or is this meant to be nothing but art?

It seems to be half art, half social experiment. I get the appeal of tracking down bits of story, and having the physical book to scribble notes & transcriptions into. But I'm not into ARGs myself, so the latter half of the event doesn't really appeal.

I realize this isn't the best place to ask this question, but while on this subject... what are some good/recommended battery solutions for mobile raspberry pi creations? In order to do things so I wouldn't have it plugged into the wall socket?

This sounds like a really exciting and properly interactive (on many levels) experiment in storytelling, with the added bonus that participants get a beautiful bound copy of their version of the story at its conclusion. This is how "interactive" is supposed to work, not "also check out our fail book page." Damn, really wish I had time to visit Bristol for a couple of days...

really interesting to read these comments on the project - some replies for everyone

@ecstatic - definitely one of our touchstones and references (and a great book) . . also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n, ... is_Tertiusand you definitely don't have to write any of it yourself, there's a full story there, but the physical gives you an 'opportunity' to document your own city, maybe to build a sort of personal universe on the page.

@Galeran - yes, all agreed and supported by numerous helpful and friendly local cafes, shops and business

@Ostracus - it definitely has connection to geocaching. We didn't go with any kind of AR for this as we wanted to really try and restrict ourselves to the written word. It was a good creative restriction for us when exploring what a book could be.Also we work a lot with mobile audio in most of our other projects (see the link below), which we still consider to be a really strong form of AR, and one that gets overlooked quite a lot.

@Kesh - agreed, we don't like ARG's either. We've left upload folders on the drives, but there's no specifics about what people should do with those. It's very much an experiment so we wanted to leave some bits open. You don't have to write/contribute anything to get a full story experience.

There's some mangling in the article about our intentions for the project. There's nothing really game-based about it, for us it's still a book, a linear story that you read. What we've tried to do is spread the content between the physical and the digital, so you need one to understand the other and vice versa. We've also worked with trying to make the reading experience have a physical engagement with the city (which is what we do in most of our other work http://productofcircumstance.com/new/ )

oh, and yes, it could definitely be called 'art' . . we're quite happy just saying it's a book though (and open to debate on that statement )

@Kesh - agreed, we don't like ARG's either. We've left upload folders on the drives, but there's no specifics about what people should do with those. It's very much an experiment so we wanted to leave some bits open. You don't have to write/contribute anything to get a full story experience.

There's some mangling in the article about our intentions for the project. There's nothing really game-based about it, for us it's still a book, a linear story that you read. What we've tried to do is spread the content between the physical and the digital, so you need one to understand the other and vice versa. We've also worked with trying to make the reading experience have a physical engagement with the city (which is what we do in most of our other work http://productofcircumstance.com/new/ )

Except it really is a game. Finding the proper locations is a game in itself, and something ARGs do quite often. As is piecing together the full story.

i can see how some people could think of the finding the locations aspect as game-like, but in the end it just comes down to what people define as a 'game', and as it's creators we definitely don't feel we've made a game (nor did we set out to), but we don't have a problem if other people see it in that way I suppose.

The reason we locate the texts around the city is to make the fictions site specific, but also to force the reader to engage with their home environment in a different way. There is a long tradition of site-specific art from way before the concept of an ARG (much of cave-painting could be considered site specific).In terms of piecing together the story we have provided quite a linear flow to the text (each location is numbered in order) so there's no more piecing together to do than in any -ahem- post-modern literature (i always hate using the pm phrase, but in this case i think it's probably relevant)

This sounds like a more techy version of the Jejune Institute. Did anyone here experience that?

A group of people in the Bay Area set up the most enveloping, immersive, well-thought-out alternate reality game in the middle of San Francisco that I've ever seen. It had you sneaking out of law offices in the financial district, "breaking into" a "detective's" office in China town, tracking down the world's smallest postal service at a normal store and bartering for a particular letter, bringing a radio to a park to find a carefully hidden AM radio station coming from a buried transmitter there, reading plaques glued to buildings providing alternate histories that looked just as real as the legitimate ones, amid tons of other adventures. The rabbit hole just kept getting deeper. All in all it was one of the most incredible alternate reality games I've ever heard of and I'm glad to hear that other groups widening that genre.

i can see how some people could think of the finding the locations aspect as game-like, but in the end it just comes down to what people define as a 'game', and as it's creators we definitely don't feel we've made a game (nor did we set out to), but we don't have a problem if other people see it in that way I suppose.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not belittling your project. I actually love the idea of giving the book to participants. And it looks like a nicely bound one, too. It just does come across as a neat "light" ARG.

Do you plan on releasing information about the event later? I'd love to see how people reacted, and if they did something unexpected (hopefully in a positive way!).

i can see how some people could think of the finding the locations aspect as game-like, but in the end it just comes down to what people define as a 'game', and as it's creators we definitely don't feel we've made a game (nor did we set out to), but we don't have a problem if other people see it in that way I suppose.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not belittling your project. I actually love the idea of giving the book to participants. And it looks like a nicely bound one, too. It just does come across as a neat "light" ARG.

Do you plan on releasing information about the event later? I'd love to see how people reacted, and if they did something unexpected (hopefully in a positive way!).

Of course I understand that and I totally get your point.It's definitely on the 'light' side in that we've pulled it together in a couple of months and when we started it was something quite different (we didn't even think there would be an actual physical book) . . the whole project was about exploring what the future of the book could be and we got to this point of physical and digital co-dependance which really excited us. (I say light, but in the end there's almost 20,000 words across the physical and digital content!)

I guess the reason I would separate it from an ARG is that it comes from a different starting point. We wanted to make a book that expanded out of the pages, but in essence it's still a book. The physical book is not just a beautiful object, it's also half the story, (and can also act as a replacement for your moleskine should you feel like it, there's lots of pages for 'notes' )

The other difference in starting point is that you're reading a 'fiction', it doesn't cast you into the story in a way an ARG does, and it doesn't use your everyday tools like websites or email. So although you are reading it in situ there's actually a lot less reality than in an ARG. and you can't affect the characters story or the outcome of the plot. What we do want to affect is your relationship with the city, and because the fiction takes place between the city you live in and a fictional parallel one, we also have this intention that the story would sort of haunt your imagination in your everyday life, that maybe you start to catch glimpses of this other city out of the corner of your eye when you're walking around.

Of course I understand that and I totally get your point.It's definitely on the 'light' side in that we've pulled it together in a couple of months and when we started it was something quite different (we didn't even think there would be an actual physical book) . . the whole project was about exploring what the future of the book could be and we got to this point of physical and digital co-dependance which really excited us. (I say light, but in the end there's almost 20,000 words across the physical and digital content!)

I guess the reason I would separate it from an ARG is that it comes from a different starting point. We wanted to make a book that expanded out of the pages, but in essence it's still a book. The physical book is not just a beautiful object, it's also half the story, (and can also act as a replacement for your moleskine should you feel like it, there's lots of pages for 'notes' )

The other difference in starting point is that you're reading a 'fiction', it doesn't cast you into the story in a way an ARG does, and it doesn't use your everyday tools like websites or email. So although you are reading it in situ there's actually a lot less reality than in an ARG. and you can't affect the characters story or the outcome of the plot. What we do want to affect is your relationship with the city, and because the fiction takes place between the city you live in and a fictional parallel one, we also have this intention that the story would sort of haunt your imagination in your everyday life, that maybe you start to catch glimpses of this other city out of the corner of your eye when you're walking around.

Heh! Yeah, 20k words of prose is not light work. I meant "light" more from the end-user's perspective, as it doesn't involve all the phone calls, web sites, acting, etc. that a full-blown ARG does.

The book idea was fantastic, really. Glad you were able to pull that off.